So, a friend of mine was just in a really bad car collision (not with another car thankfully). He was taken to a hospital and was unconscious and had fractured his skull. It took about 6 hours until his family was notified! It was on the website of our local newspaper like within the hour of the crash. I googled it and it seems like others have experienced the same thing where the emergency contacts aren’t called for hours after the collision.
So, my idea is that we could connect a raspberry pi to a bluetooth OBD-II adapter. Then when the OBD signals that the airbag is deployed the raspberry pi would notify a smartphone to call 911 and any emergency contacts. However, I did a little googling and found that getting whether the airbag has been deployed would be different for each manufacturer and is proprietary so there is no easy way to get it! I guess that is why OnStar has got basically a monopoly on providing services like this.
So, I was also thinking that airbags would probably not be the only system affected when in a crash that would cause the airbags to deploy. Would be interesting to collect data from the OBD to find out what other things are indicators…
So, this idea seems worthy of a kickstarter for Procyon :). Also, I’ve seen most of the better kickstarters have cool youtube videos. The guy who was in the accident has a degree in film and has made commercials so maybe we could get him involved. Would be fun to get into autonomous vehicles eventually. This might be a good start.
However, back in 2010 someone tried doing this sort of thing only based on the smart phone’s ability to measure Gs by the accelerometer. Pretty cool. However, it seems like they had troubles with false positives. http://mobilware.org/2010/presentations/Car%20Accidents.pdf But, since then, they haven’t done anything to continue the work. They did have a neat idea where they would also broadcast location of wreck to a map service so that people could route around it.
EDIT: Well I found someone that offers this as a service http://my-911.com/. They make you purchase the dongle and then they offer their software as a service that you subscribe to. They don’t seem to have a big market. I think that if we could sell it to taxi/limo companies. Then passengers could provide emergency contact info. And if the user has the app they would be able to just get into any car and it would be able to interface with the bluetooth device automatically.
EDIT 2: Well I no longer think we should even work on this. It has been done and done well by https://www.automatic.com/. It is just about how I would have done it too. They have a built in accelerometer in the dongle that attaches to the OBD port, so they don’t have to figure out how to know if the air bag has been deployed. Also, they have really good support so that it isn’t just your phone automatically calling they have a nice protocol set up. I emailed them and told them about Procyon and an idea I had while I was looking at their site that I think we could provide and a broken link I found on their site. Cool if they respond.